MIGHT WANT TO PRINT THIS OUT AND READ IT ON THE CAN, THIS IS A LONG POST.
Freshman year, have to live in the dorms. Dorm internet is horrible. We had 6mb shared between the entire campus. That included the academic building (classrooms) , all the labs, and the entire dorms. As you can imagine, I felt like I was back in the pre-2k era. When they arranged us for rooms, they grouped us by major and hobbies. Our entire hallway was full of Computer Engineers. You get that many geeks together pissed off at slow internet, looking for a way to get faster internet, you're basically asking for trouble. We brewed plans and ideas daily... We quickly realized both the Wireless and the Labs were twice as fast as the dorm room connections. They were set up on different subnets with $10k Cisco switches and were able to throttle the bandwidth at will for the most part. The worst part was our I.T. was stupid at managing bandwidth. There is only wireless in the Academic Building across the street. It's locked up at 6 P.M. There is nobody in that building from 6 - 6. So you would think that they would cut that bandwidth and distribute it all back to the dorms, it just makes more sense. Nope, we were still stuck with Google not even loading and a crapload of bandwidth just being wasted in that building across the street. On top of that, we were getting DOS'ed from China randomly , a lot of times our internet would completely go down. To make it worse, they disabled ALL protocols on the network. No P2P at all. Funny how they sucked at everything else, but they were really able to lock that stuff up. I couldnt' get on IRC, no Kazaa, no Ares, no Bearshare, no Bittorrent, nothing. We were paying $30k a year to go this private university, one of the nation's highest-ranked universities, and we were getting shafted. We wanted faster internet - and we got it
The RA, 2 fellow freshman, and I used the RA's key to unlock the switch closet on our floor, just to take a look around, see what/if we could do anything. Basically just scoping out the situation. To our surprise, the wireless Access Point which had worked last year was still in there, but had NO POWER CABLE. We had wondered why we weren't getting wireless in the dorms when we had before, that was the reason. So basically the switch closet consisted of a few stacks of these Cisco switches, the lines all going to dorm rooms (and labs on the floor). The wireless AP was in the top right corner, all by itself, plugged into one solitary port, but not powered on. What we did is we unhooked that cable, hooked up a 5-port switch to where the wireless was plugged in, then connected our room's lines into that switch. Easy. 4 of us were now connected to the wireless internet, in our rooms, through the port on our wall. It would be the same thing as if we were in the building across the street, with all that wasted bandwidth to ourselves.
So we go back, test it out, brings up the wireless login page, we login, goes through fine, and we're rolling along. We do some speed tests...highest one was like 3.4mbit down, can't remember the up. We had more than half of the entire bandwidth all to ourselves. I must admit, with our goal of "getting faster internet", we definitely succeeded. 8 hours. That's how long it lasted. I'm working on my computer the next day and all of sudden I get a no-connect error. Run over to my friend's, no-connect, the other friend's, and the RA's. Then I have someobdy else who wasn't involved check it out, internet works fine for them. It's just us
A quick return to the scene of the crime... Our switch is gone, our cables are back in their normal spots and our ports have been shut off (damn Ciscos). Shit, we're screwed. Well, while we're in here, we might as well hook up to the empty rooms so we can at least get slow internet back. So we do that, it works for a little while, then "just us" again and we figure out that time that they use Mac Address and we forgot to change them
So at this point, us 4 initially got kicked, we all hooked back up to empty rooms, got them kicked (8 now), and now we tried again. We all change our mac addresses and mooch off our buddies, lol. We seriously had ethernet cables going down the hallway and outside through windows so we could mooch off our friend's unbanned internet. Working good, installing the latest XBMC on my Xbox and I get kicked again.. But because I was mooching off my friend's, he actually got kicked. Guess what I forgot? The Xbox is registerred under my name too and when I connected to the network again with my Xbox, it got my buddy kicked.
4 of us initially, 4 empty rooms, 1 friend who was just trying to help me out.
9 rooms completely banned from the network, doesn't even show a network connection, it's like somebody went and actually cut the ethernet cable with some scissors.
In the end... 7 charges (can't remember them all because they were all bullshit). Tampering with the network was the only one I remember being plausible. I think one of them was endangering students, vandalism was another one, I wish I still had the letter. It was ridiculous.
We had to go up in front of the student disciplinary dean or whatever her title was, she wasn't too happy. We didn't deny doing it, we couldn't. We just used the straight honest facts and truth. Our internet sucked, we felt we were being shafted paying 30 grand a year for Google to not load. We had the ability to take action to fix the problem, and to be able to do it without hurting anybody else, so we did. During the entire process, no security was breached, nobody was kicked off the internet, no viruses, no attacks, no packet spamming/sniffing, nothing. We were in fact still under the same security limitations that we would be under on a normal day. The only difference is we were using this "unused" bandwidth. In our eyes, we didn't really do anything wrong. We were simply doing what we do best. Computer engineers, solving a technical problem with no side effects. Hell, we should get extra credit for this!
After talking to the dean, we had to go down and talk to I.T. Believe it or not, they were actually pretty cool with the entire thing. I guess because they knew what happened, what we did, why we did it, and saw no real "problems" with it, they were just like "meh." They really didn't care, just wanted to know our side of the story, which they arleady knew. They said we appreciate the honesty and know you guys weren't doing anything to hurt anybody, sos we're just going to ask you to stick with the crappy internet. We know it sucks, but that's the budget. Talking with the I.T. about all this was actually pretty fun to me.
So there you have it, bad bad Textbook getting in trouble over something stupid. I don't regret it one bit, not at all, never will. It was probably one of the most interesting experiences I've ever gone through.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, the internet was upgraded to a shared 30mb this year. Still not enough, but it's better than 6. In the end, we acheived something at least. You're all welcome, incoming Freshman. You can finally load Google in the dorms.
EDIT2: Rumors are so fun too. We were the talk of the campus for the week. Everybody, including professors, had known we did "something" with the network. People were saying stuff like we were hacking the network, and kicking people off. I remember overhearing "they took the entire network down." LMAO! It felt cool to be thought of as a hacker that week. I could threaten people, be like "You and I are on the same network, remember that"
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Topic: A Few Easy Questions About Campus Networks. (Read 82 times)